☕️ IT BEGINS ☙ Saturday, April 26, 2025 ☙ C&C NEWS 🦠

As Trump marks his first 100 days in office, the arrests of public officials begins. Get the real story here.

Good morning, C&C, it’s Saturday! Time for the Weekend Edition. And just like that, another breaking story consumed yesterday’s news cycle and required a special post to correct the media’s attempt to reframe the narrative. You’re going to love it: first of all, the arrests have started. The FBI perp-walked not just one, but two judges yesterday. And the progressive world is losing its ever-lovin’ mind. Bless their hearts. Here is the real story, which you’ll have trouble finding anywhere else.

🌍 WORLD NEWS AND COMMENTARY 🌍

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The media burst into sulphurous flames yesterday, and the hot takes exploded like a meth-lab accident in a Chinese fireworks factory. Yesterday, Axios ran its story headlined, “‘Unbelievable’: Congress erupts over FBI arrest of Wisconsin judge Hannah Dugan.” Federal officials arrested two judges yesterday. Wisconsin Representative Mark Pocan (D-Wis.) cried, “The Trump administration again is breaking norms in how it's dealing with the legal system, and normalcy. This is stuff I expect from Third World countries.”

In case you somehow missed the excitement, here’s what actually happened. About eight days ago, back on April 18th, Milwaukee Circuit Court Judge Hannah Dugan was presiding over an unremarkable criminal case involving a Mexican national charged with three counts of battery and domestic abuse. A couple of his victims were seated in the gallery waiting to testify. The accused, Jose Flores-Ruiz, was an illegal alien already deported in 2013, but it didn’t stick and he came back to commit more crimes.

Because of all the media misinformation, here is a link to the government’s complaint so you can read it for yourself. Note that a federal judge signed Judge Dugan’s arrest warrant— she had ample due process. Or, if you’re more of a listener, here’s Pam Bondi’s explanation about both arrests from a Fox interview yesterday (8:00).

Anyway, before Flores-Ruiz’s hearing started, court staff snuck word to Judge Dugan got word that FBI, CBP, and DEA agents had staked out the gallery and the hallway outside the courtroom, and were waiting for the hearing to finish so they could arrest Lopez. This enraged the judge (“this is absurd!”). So she sprang up —or at least attempted a rough approximation of ‘springing’— and moved ponderously into action. She first adjourned the hearing, grabbed the judge in the courtroom next door for backup and, after demanding to see the agents’ warrant, ordered them to go to the Chief Judge’s office. They complied.

While agents were on the phone with the Chief Judge, Judge Dugan’s courtroom deputy came over and warned them the judge was trying to “push through” Lopez’s hearing, to get him out of the building while the agents were tied up talking to the Chief Judge. Meanwhile, back in her courtroom, Judge Dugan ordered Lopez and his attorney to come up to the bench, and after a frenzied, whispered conversation, personally escorted them out the courtroom’s private back door reserved for jurors and prisoners.

Lopez fled using a back elevator and sprinted off down 9th street. Fortunately, an alert agent spotted the serial crimedoer leaving. The team scrambled and a dramatic foot chase ensued. They finally tackled Lopez near State Street and 10th.

Yesterday morning, the FBI filed a federal complaint and shortly thereafter arrested Judge Dugan at the courthouse. She’s charged with obstruction of ICE proceedings (18 U.S.C. § 1505) and harboring or concealing a person to prevent discovery and arrest (18 U.S.C. § 1071)— both serious felonies.

The federal criminal complaint identifies several witnesses who saw everything that happened.

Later in the day, Judge Dugan was released without bond after making her first appearance in federal court. If convicted, she certainly can’t be a judge, and will probably lose her law license. Even without a verdict, the pending charges are a huge headache for the Chief Judge. How can Judge Dugan continue to preside over other criminal cases while she’s under indictment herself?

Will Wisconsin’s left-leaning Supreme Court remove her?

🔥 Speaking of removed judges, remember New Mexico Judge Juan “Joel” Cano, who let a 23-year-old Tren de Aragua gang member live for free in his guest house? The FBI arrested him yesterday, too, along with his wife, ‘Nancy.’ You won’t believe what they charged the now-former judge with.

In March, HSI (Homeland Security Investigations) arrested Venezuelan illegal alien and guesthouse resident Cristhian Ortega-Lopez, who is suspected of being in Tren de Aragua — a notorious, ultra-violent criminal gang that’s basically the Venezuelan version of MS-13. They nabbed him at Judge Cano’s home, where the family had both put him up and given him assault weapons to play with.

When FBI arrested him, they found Ortega had multiple cellphones. Afterwards, agents realized that one phone was missing. They realized this after Ortega told them. (They’d offered to let him make a phone call and gave him the phones they’d seized; Ortega said the one he wanted to use wasn’t there.) So this week, they returned to the Cano household with a new search warrant.

I promise I am not making this next part up.

During his FBI interview, former judge Cano —after being Mirandized— straight-up confessed that he’d found Ortega’s missing cellphone, smashed it with a hammer, and threw it in a city dumpster. Cano explained he did it because he knew it had pictures and videos of Ortega with guns— which were direct evidence of federal gun crimes and gang activity.

Cano’s confession is such an unlikely and improbable fact that you should see the allegation for yourself:

It’s hard to reckon how a long-time judge would agree to talk to FBI agents at all, much less after getting his Miranda warnings and without a lawyer. Regular readers will recall that, when I first reported this story, I suggested Judge Cano should have already retained a good criminal defense lawyer. All I can say now is, he should’ve read C&C.

Cano didn’t just smash a phone; he smashed his oath, his robes, and his integrity. Yesterday, in the harsh morning light of the bright Las Cruces sun, FBI agents arrested Cano and charged him with destroying evidence to protect a defendant (18 USC §1512). The charge allows up to 20 years in prison. As a first-time offender, he’d probably only get 12-24 months, but the sentencing guidelines require enhancement for cartel involvement.

Cano is in deep doo-doo. Regardless of whatever happens in the criminal case, he admitted destroying evidence of crimes— a violation of ethics that virtually requires disbarment. New Mexico’s Supremes already barred him from ever again serving as a judge, so his law license is almost certainly a goner.

Here’s a link to the federal complaint against former Judge Cano.

Remember this: the media was present for both arrests. We’ll return to that shortly.

🔥 First, let’s consider what all this means. I’ll start with my point of view: Both Dugan and Cano must be prosecuted aggressively — not just for individual accountability, but to send a clear signal that domestic sabotage of immigration enforcement is criminal, not heroic. Otherwise, the rule of law, already bleeding out, will die on the operating table.

The two cases are remarkably similar. Behold:

• Sitting judges,

• Engaging in criminal acts,

• To protect illegal alien defendants involved in violent crime and/or cartel activity,

• Directly interfering with federal law enforcement.

The juxtaposition of the two eerily similar cases involving two judges in two different states arrested on the same day paints a picture. It’s a dystopian picture of decentralized, ideological sabotage of immigration enforcement inside the judiciary itself. Judges are no longer passively ignoring federal law through non-cooperation but actively working against it through affirmative criminal acts of their own.

It’s an insurrection from behind the bench.

Aggressive prosecution isn’t optional. It’s mandatory. If we wish to retain the ‘rule of law,’ that is.

🔥 The political fallout was explosive. Corporate media, Democrats, and BlueSky’s blue-checks were apoplectic, practically foaming at the mouth. In situ, silver-haired boomer protestors, supported by canes and walkers, popped up outside Dugan’s courthouse:

Progressive commenters saw the arrests as nothing less than an assault on the judiciary:

Speaking of Representative Raskin, the former chair of the J6 committee and one of the House impeachment prosecutors during Trump 1.0 called the arrests a “dangerous new front” in Trump’s war against judges:

Democrat media consultant David Doak, apparently having already forgotten four years of enthusiastic lawfare against the former president, and the rule of turnabout being fair play, announced the United States is now officially a police state:

But some progressive legal experts were slightly more cautious. MSNBC’s legal expert, for example, wondered whether this was the “best way to handle” what are admittedly bad-looking facts for the judge. He said, “It doesn't look great for the judge, no matter how you slice it. But was this kind of escalatory action the best course of action, to actually go and arrest her, take her to court, and federally charge her? That's a big step.”

CLIP: progressive legal expert Ken Dilanian says at first blush, it looks bad (0:36).

In short, MSNBC’s expert Dilania called for ‘prosecutorial restraint.’ In other words, maybe judges should be above the law after all, if they’re on our team.

We tried to warn them. But they couldn’t conceive of Trump winning the election.

👨‍⚖️ All that said, horrified progressive politicians and hysterical corporate media are missing the point. Judges get arrested all the time. Here are three examples: Judge arrested for DUI:

Judge arrested for battery and assaulting a police officer:

Judge arrested for murder:

So this is not just about arresting judges.

The next thing the media missed is that Judges Cano and Dugan are categorically different from other judicial arrestees. Judges Cano and Dugan didn’t just lapse morally — they used their official judicial power to actively sabotage federal law enforcement. The two new cases don’t just show a lapse in judgment, they show judges misusing their authority to fight federal law on behalf of foreign criminal interests.

It’s an existential threat to judicial legitimacy. Some judges have apparently forgotten where their authority comes from.

👨‍⚖️ So far, Republicans are largely missing the point, too. Yesterday, they predictably shot back with Democrats’ favorite slogan: no one is above the law. Judges can’t just uphold the laws they like and ignore the ones they disagree with; that’s as anti-democratic as it gets. Attorney General Bondi:

Still, as we’ve seen, arresting judges for committing crimes is neither rare nor remarkable. What we are witnessing here is a desperate effort by progressives to reclaim their dissolving narrative.

👨‍⚖️ Progressives and their media allies have been pushing back on Trump’s mass deportations, framing them as cruel and lacking proper due process. Liberal judges have been interfering with the agenda every way they can, with multiple cases having already reached the Supreme Court. Public frustration has been steadily mounting on both sides; liberals jubilant about the effective judicial resistance, conservatives furious at progressive jurists’ attempts to stymie a clear electoral mandate to remove illegal criminals.

This isn’t any sudden new Trump strategy. The Cano case shows the DOJ started working on this problem from the moment Trump took office in January. They were obviously primed to locate clear cases of judicial misconduct— and fate handed them two perfect examples on a silver salver.

Using its long-standing tools of selective reporting, media is doing its best to obscure the real facts. But now we have Twitter and Substack. And the facts are gushing out.

The progressive wailing on BlueSky is actually grief; grief at their dwindling deportations narrative, a narrative of courageous judges standing up to the Trump Administration’s cruel deportation machine. They are panicking because they suspect the double arrests will chill judicial resistance going forward (though I’ll bet we hear much less about Judge Cano’s case).

Now, instead of courageous judicial resisters, America sees lawless judges helping gangbangers and domestic abusers escape justice. MAGA sees long-awaited arrests beginning. The base sees the DOJ finally arresting the Swamp’s protectors, instead of just endlessly complaining about the Swamp.

Many conservatives have long believed (with good reason) that no matter what or who they voted for, the permanent bureaucracy and the progressive judiciary would just nullify it. But now, conservatives are seeing something they thought could never happen: real consequences for real lawbreaking— by elites. And not for minor procedural slip-ups or technicalities, but for dangerous legal sabotage that endangered innocent American citizens.

In other words, just when Democrats were celebrating over Trump’s slipping approval polls, he served up Judges Cano and Dugan. Progressives can’t help themselves. They took the bait.

👨‍⚖️ Recent polls showed Trump’s approval numbers slipping slightly after weeks of media-driven attacks. Progressive pundits crowed about “shifting momentum.” BlueSky, MSNBC, and the ex-Biden team were giddy, sensing a narrative opening: Maybe Trump’s mass deportations are finally backfiring! New York Times headline, yesterday:

Intoxicated with what they believed was momentum shifting in their favor, yesterday, Democrats enthusiastically seized on the twin judicial arrests as more evidence of orange-shaded authoritarianism!

But the reality is much more damning: these cases involved violent and gang-connected criminals — defendants who judges granted special privileges that ordinary Americans like you and me would never receive. One judge smuggled a domestic abuser out of court to evade ICE; another destroyed evidence to protect a Venezuelan gang member tied to illegal firearms.

The media’s flimsy narrative about defending judicial independence won’t hold up under the harsh light of the facts. It won’t hold up because Americans can clearly sense the inherent injustice: Democrats are trying in vain to defend their two-tiered justice system — one system for protected classes of criminals, and another for the rest of us.

Just when Democrats thought they were gaining ground, Trump flipped the narrative table and is smothering them with it. He forced progressives to switch from offense —attacking Trump— to defending indefensible judges, at precisely the worst time. It’s politically suicidal.

It’s also the first cautious steps on the road to flattening the two-tiered justice system. Now the nation is on notice. Everyone, on all sides, is wondering: if the DOJ has grown an appetite for eating judges who defy federal law— who’s next?

Have a wonderful weekend and a blessed Sunday! C&C shall return again first thing Monday morning, with another engaging roundup of essential news and commentary. See you then.

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